Mathletics Team Vies in Putnam Competition

By Holly Foster Posted December 12, 2010

Students from the Hamilton Mathletics team participated on Dec. 4 in the nationwide William Lowell Putnam mathematics competition. With 13 students taking part, it was one of the strongest turnouts in Hamilton's history. The participants were Jeremy Adelman '13, Mihai Dohotaru '13, Will Eagan '11, Dan Kamenetsky '11, Robert Kosar '12, Giulio Meille '12, Yonghyun Song '13, Nate Taylor '11, Maile Thayer '11, Evan VanTassell '13, Adam Vorchheimer '11, Ke Xu '11, Sichen Xu '12. They had trained for the competition all semester with Assistant Professor of Mathematics Andrew Dykstra.

The competition, which was held on campus, took the form of a six-hour written exam that was broken into two three-hour sessions. As they are every year, the 12 problems on this year's Putnam exam were some of the most challenging undergraduate problems imaginable. In a typical year, the median score on the exam is only one or two points out of 120 points possible. Since each problem is worth 10 points, it is considered a tremendous accomplishment to answer just one of the 12 problems correctly. The results of the exam will be known by March 2011.